Explore "The Spanish Pioneers" by Charles Fletcher Lummis on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
While Columbus was sailing back and forth between the Old World and the new one which he had found, was building towns and naming what were to be nations, England seemed almost ready to take a hand. All Europe was interested in the strange news which came from Spain. England moved through the instrumentality of a Venetian, whom we know as Sebastian Cabot. On the 5th of March, 1496, -- four years after Columbus's discovery, -- Henry VII. of England granted a patent to "John Gabote, a citizen of Venice," and his three sons, allowing them to sail westward on a voyage of discovery. John, and Sebastian his son, sailed from Bristol in 1497, and saw the mainland of America at daybreak, June 24, of the same year, -- probably the coast of Nova Scotia, -- but did nothing. After their return to England, the elder Cabot died. In May, 1498, Sebastian sailed on his second voyage, which probably took him into Hudson's Bay and a few hundred miles down the coast.
There is little probability in the theory that he ever saw any part of what is now the United States. He was a northern rover, -- so thoroughly so, that the three hundred colonists whom he brought out perished with cold in July.